The Wind Will
by SaoirseConnelly
Summary: Collection of random moments from Fiona and Michael's life together. Will be rated M eventually.  Repost.
1. Living With Fiona

There are things he hates about living with Fi. Her cold feet against his in the middle of the night. Finding clots of hair in his tiny shower. The way she blows through his yogurt, steals his clothes to sleep in, eavesdrops and snoops when it suits her, uses the floor as a laundry basket, slams the door at the end of every argument. Oh, and the arguments- exhausting, hours-long, going over the fine points of their jobs until they were both cross-eyed with exhaustion and at each other's throats-

Like he said, there are a lot of things he hates about living with Fi.

But then there are the good things. The weight of her hand in his at the end of a horrible day. Always having an eager sparring partner when he wanted to work out- or when he didn't and she'd jab his ribs or kick at his shins until he did. How her devil's advocate position in arguments helped him pick through the problems with his handler and see the situation more clearly.

Her husky laugh breaking into the intense moments and making him laugh.

The smell of the back of her neck, just below her hairline, the first thing in the morning.

Oh, and the taste of it too.

And the line of her back and the feel of her hips, smooth and luxurious under his hands.

Her hands yanking hard at his hair when she jerks awake and rolls over him and murmurs, "Feeling randy this morning, Michael?"

And the tip of her delicious tongue on the outside of his lips.

Okay, there were some great things about living with Fi, too.


	2. Shopping, Michael and Fi Style

It's the middle of June and they're buying a late ("very late," Michael heard her hmph in his head) Mother's Day gift for Maddie. She had been pouting and cranky for weeks, until Sam took pity on them and not so subtly pointed them to Maddie's favorite "Antiquities and Curiousities," telling them to go redeem themselves. Looking at the dusty displays and stacks of crap, Michael amends the name to "Assortments of Crap."

He looked at a shelf lined with decorative plates with poorly-rendered depictions of British royalty on them and sighed. "How good a gift does this have to be to make up for us forgetting?"

Fi was examining an old hat covered in crumbling ostrich feathers and rhinestones. "_I_ didn't forget," she says in a pious voice. "Back home, Mother's Day is the same day as Mothering Sunday, the fourth Sunday in Lent."

She grins at Michael, putting the hat down, and he narrows his eyes. "Then you would be even later than me, because it would have been... in the beginning of April this year."

She rolls her eyes and smirks. "Yes, and I took her out to lunch."

The shop is deserted except for a big black man reading an old Life magazine behind the counter, and then the door opens and street noise floods the room. Dust motes circle in the shafts of light pouring in, and they glance over. A man calls in, "Hey, you got a public bathroom?"

The black man nods, not lifting his eyes from the magazine. The man turns back and waves in a little girl and a chubby dark-haired woman holding a baby. "Go get him changed and I don't want to be here all day," he tells the woman, who disappears into the back of the store. The kid veers away from her father immediately, bouncing down the aisles and looking like Aladdin in a cave of treasures. "And don't you break anything, Destini, I mean it."

Michael inches closer to Fi. "You'd think she'd understand why I've been a little preoccupied, what with getting my job back and adapting to certain personal changes," he grumbles.

She's looking in a glass case at some rings and tangled chains. "I wish he would stock a few antique guns at least." She scrunches her nose. They are wearing their nonchalance like battle armor, not ready to admit how happy they are cohabitating. If their relationship history proved anything, it was that things could change at the speed of a bullet, and this might blow up in their faces yet.

He pokes a finger at some old brooches, lying on a velvet cloth. _Fake_, he thinks. _Figures_. Fiona traces a hand across his shoulders and leans back against him. "We should take her to that Afro-Cuban place she's been talking about," she muses as he wraps an arm around her waist.

"Didn't I get enough African food in Africa?" he replies, grinning at her despite himself, eager for any distraction. She's certainly enough of one- wearing her hair down over an off-the-shoulder t-shirt, her sunglasses hooked on the pocket of her jeans. He pulls them out and slides them on her face and she smiles. She's rising up on her toes and leaning in to whisper something in his ear, he can feel her breath on his cheek, when there's a crash.

Michael and Fiona's heads snap up and their legs tense on the ground, ready to move. They look around and see the kid lying on the ground. She had been hanging off a big carved Indian when it fell over and smashed into a silver-framed mirror. Now she's staring at the shattered mirror, her face stricken. Michael feels his intestines start to twist at the expression on her face, and the girl's parents emerge from opposite sides of the store. When her father starts to scream, the baby's hiccupy cries cut off in mid-gulp.

"What did I tell you? Huh?" He grabs her arm, roughly, pulling her to her feet. "Look at this! Look at what you did! Stupid, stupid, _stupid_!" He shakes her with every "stupid" and then yanks her forward. She stretches out her hand to catch herself on something, but there's nothing there but him and she falls to her knees on the floor. Fiona glances at Michael, who is watching the woman's eyes widen. She bites her lip and turns away, jiggling the baby on her hip.

The black man behind the counter gets to his feet slowly, like a train starting to roll. "Quit yellin', you're disturbin' customers." His deep, heavy voice rumbles out and breaks the mood. Michael has let go of her, and now he steps away and toward the man.

"Yeah, _customers_," the father mutters. He glances at Michael and Fiona, his eyes dropping to Michael's clenched fists. "Will you deal with this?" he throws back at his wife over his shoulder.

The door slams shut behind him and that spurs the mother into action. She goes to her daughter, reaches a hand down to lift her up. "Oh, Destini, it's okay. It was just a mistake. Daddy knows it was a mistake. We're okay now."

Michael turns away and put his hands flat on the counter. Fi glances at her face and immediately wishes she hadn't. His face is blank, except for his dark eyes, looking weary and terrified. He looks like the little girl, who is hanging her head down as she trudges out of the store behind her mom and the baby.

Fi stands next to him, watching his hands now, the fingernails whitened from pressure. "Want to tail them and blow out their tires?"

"No, that'll just make things worse for her." Michael straightens up, turns to her and gives a halfway typical Westen smile. "Shit always rolls downhill," he says, his voice struggling to be light. He grabs the first thing at hand, a small bejeweled peacock lamp. "Think she'll like this?"

"Isn't your mom freaked by peacocks? I thought there was some kind of traumatic vacation in your childhood or something."

"Let's get something and go." He puts the lamp down with a clack that sounds like her knees hitting the floor. Fi winces. "She-I just want to go."

"Okay," Fi says. "Let's go. If you don't want to get her anything, we don't have to." He looks at her for a long moment and finally nods. "I'll be out in a minute," she tells him.

He's waiting on the corner, his hands shoved in the pockets, and they fall in step together. When he starts talking, it's like he's unaware of it. "I don't think about it much anymore. I used to keep the words in my head, the feeling- feeling hot all over. And when I let go of that," he stops and she reaches down and holds his wrist, curling her fingers around his blood-beat, so tight he can feel the pulse in her fingertips. "I don't know when I let go of that, it wasn't there until they started- until I heard her say that." He looks down at her hand on him and their feet matching pace and his sunglasses slide down until she can see his eyes. She is glad of that, and then he looks up again and they're gone. "Then it was like hearing my mother again."

"Do you think she's sorry?"

He exhales loudly. "Does it matter?"

"If it matters to you."

"I didn't think it did." She is quiet until he looks at her and then she gives him a wry, humorless smile. He returns it.

"I know it matters to her," she says softly. He doesn't respond. They reach the car and she doesn't let go of him. "I can't hear it. When I hear her, I don't hear that woman's voice in it."

She squeezes his wrist hard, as hard as the ache of pain inside him, and when she lets go, standing there on the street beside the car, passers-by bumping into them, he feels his guts loosen for the first time since he saw the little girl look at the shattered mirror. He looks at her face, serene behind her wide sunglasses, and then he realizes he can let go of everything he wants to release.

She weaves around him and gets in the car, and when she rolls down the window he tells her, "I think I'm going to go back and get her something."

Fi reached in her purse and pulled out an antique silver cigarette lighter. "I thought you might say that."

Much later that night, Michael is sitting at the counter, bits and pieces of a gun laid in front of him. Fi comes out of the bathroom, shoves the gun aside, and boosts up in front of him. She is rubbing the wet out of her hair, a towel hanging over her face, and without needing to look at him, she puts her feet on his knees to balance herself. "Why are you rebuilding a gun at nearly midnight?" she asks from around the terrycloth.

A long pause fills up the corners of the loft. "I don't like seeing things and not doing anything."

"You can't save everyone, Michael." She drops the towel and looks at him, a drop of water sliding down her cheek like a tear. He doesn't respond. "Some people save themselves." She walks her feet up his chest to the base of his throat, twisting her legs up. "_You_ did."

Finally he grabs her foot and pulls it back down, putting his hand flat against the sole. "Did I?"

"Sure. We wouldn't be sitting here now if you hadn't."

"I got myself out, made my life the life I thought I wanted it to be." He rubs the silken curve that is the arch of her foot. "But who I am now, that's because of the people I work with. I am better because of Sam and because of you," he tells her, his voice deliberate and his eyes so serious it makes her want to laugh. He runs his free hand up her face, along the line the drop of water had taken. He doesn't say it, but she sees it in his face. _This is the better parts of me. What's worth saving._

Her face is clean and naked, shiny with the humidity from her bath. She could pass for a co-ed talking to her boyfriend during finals, especially when she smiles at him, like now. "Do you want some help?" she asks in a voice vibrating with emotion, pointing to the gun.

"Sure," he nods, and as she starts to climb off the counter, she wraps her arms around his neck and embraces him. And he understands what her arms are saying: _Same goes._

She kisses his mouth three times, rapidly, and he pulls her onto his chair, half on his lap. It's the best words they never say, and when they crawl in bed together, they don't say them again and again.


	3. Sickbed

Michael didn't get sick.

He said so on many occasions, usually when Fi or Sam or Maddie were sick with some bug or other, and when they glared at him, as they always did, he'd ask them if they had ever considered eating more yogurt.

Fi had sworn on at least three occasions that when he did get sick, properly sick and not shot and run over and on the verge of dying sick, she was going to force so much yogurt down him he wouldn't want to touch the stuff again. She usually said it while she was weakly trying to shove him off her bed (being sick made her solitary and violent, like a hibernating bear) and coughing or breathing in his face in an attempt to infect him (being sick also made her particularly spiteful).

None of her attempts were successful, and Fi may never have seen Michael really ill if he hadn't had to sit on top of a twenty-five story building in the middle of the night and photograph a hand-off between a government contractor and the first cousin once removed of a North Korean higher-up. The contractor and first cousin were engaged in a passionate affair, and Michael had to sit for fifty-three minutes, through their enthusiastic screws on the desk and against the wall, before he handed her a flash drive. Eight minutes into his fifty-three, the contractor and the first cousin once removed crashed into the wall, knocking his U-Penn diploma onto the floor, and it started to pour down rain. It was warm at first, a summer rain, but Michael started to shiver regardless. He hadn't been feeling completely himself, not that that was the same thing as being sick, but as the rain and the wind turned colder and started to slap and yank at him, he felt his chest start to tighten up.

He pushed the pain aside, pulled his jacket over his head, and held the camera against his chest. Max had reassured him CIA cameras worked in any weather. Unfortunately for Michael, his fingers may have been CIA-sanctioned, but they were not CIA-issued. By the time he crawled off the roof, they were so stiff he kept fumbling with the little camera. Twenty-five flights of stairs later, he met Max and Raines in a security company van parked in front of the building. Max was paring an apple, the peel hanging in a long single strip, and Raines was reading tomorrow's edition of the Washington paper. _Nice work if you can get it_, Michael thought bitterly. His thighs were trembling from the long climb down the stairs, his knees red-hot pockets of pain. He frowned and tried not to rub at them as he slowly sank down on a seat in the van.

"Camera?" Raines asked impatiently and Michael passed it to him without comment. He handed it off to a nameless tech- they used a different set on every op, it seemed- and Max tossed him a towel with a sympathetic glance. He dried off as best he could, but he still had to sit in damp clothes for thirty more minutes until they hammered out the plan to blackmail the contractor to find out about other operatives in the U.S.

"Are you sure you're not coming down with something, Michael?" Max asked for the second time as the van swung around to his place and Michael climbed it. "You sound awful." His body was wracked with shivers, and he coughed a few times, something phlegmy and rattling he had never heard come out of his own mouth before.

"I'm not sick," he muttered in reply, ignoring the chorus of sneezes that followed his statement. "I never get sick."

Max's chin moved in an attempt to hide his humor. "Obviously."

It was close to 4am as he trudged up the stairs, but there was a light from the windows that shone through the endless monsoon. He caught himself hoping desperately she would be awake. If anyone could distract him from a shitty night like this, it would be Fi. But when he hauled his weary body inside, his shoes making spongey, squishy sounds with every step, he saw she was sprawled along the exact middle of the bed, sound asleep.

As he pulled his wet clothes and shoes off, he smiled in spite of the fatigue and assorted aches afflicting him. She could look peaceful like this, her face placid and her arms folded across her stomach; his personal hurricane slowed to a light breeze that did nothing more than ripple the water. Of course, she was also sleeping like a baby with her laptop blaring her new favorite song about three inches from her face. Michael winced as he bent closer, pressed a few buttons, and moved the machine off the bed.

Fi stirred a little in the sudden silence, making a sleepy noise in her throat, and she stretched her arm up and slammed her fist under his chin.

He snapped back, one hand flying to his head. He wiggled his jaw and laughed a little under his breath. Okay, maybe she wasn't so peaceful in her sleep after all. _I should really take a shower, warm up. _He coughed, wrapping an arm around his ribs as the cough went on and on. But she looked so comfortable. He sank down on the edge of the bed, turned on his side to face her._ I'll just rest for a minute. _He coughed again, cleared a throat that felt like it was lined with grit. _Thank god I never get sick_, he thought, and fell into sleep like it was a deep, dark cave.

He slept through the end of the night and the beginning of the morning and into the late afternoon. Bits of him struggled awake for a minute or two, his mind catching a piece of daylight and straining to hold onto it before the darkness sucked him down. He woke with pain, the sheets too scratchy, the comforter too heavy, the air too hot. And usually, he woke coughing, his whole body seized with it, his gag reflex kicking in with the force of his spasms, doubling him over and making him heave with the effort and the lack of breath. And then, when he could finally suck in some air, he would fall back on the bed, his hands unfisting and a small moan of relief slipping out.

He woke once, in the late afternoon, his head pounding like the entire U.S. Army was running drills inside his brain. Someone was pushing something into his mouth, and he jerked his head away, moarning as the movement caused a wave of dizziness hit his stomach. Thoughts drifted hapharzardly across his brain like pollen-drunk, fat bees and he wondered if he had been drugged. Was this Somalia again? No, he was dizzy, he was on a boat somewhere-

And then he smelled her. She always smelled so good, it made him want to move closer, pick her up and press his face to her hair, inhaling, shivering-

_Shivering_. He frowned. _That's not right._ He could feel his arms shaking, he was so cold all of a sudden, and he heard her talking, rhythmic and soothing. She pulled a blanket up to his chin and then raised something to his mouth, her hand holding his head up like he was a little kid and a bit of water filled his mouth. He was suddenly ravenously thirsty and he took a few deep swallows before she moved the glass away. His head dropped back to the sheet like a stone. The water had felt wonderful and cool in his mouth but stung like a knife as it went down his throat. "Fi?" he rasped out, his eyes not even open enough to see the huge, beaming smile on her face when she turned around.

"Michael!" She picked up his hand, and he almost moaned again at how good her soft, cool skin felt. "How do you feel? Sam came by. He said he never thought he'd see you so sick. Almost wanted to take a picture to savor the event, but I talked him out of it-"

"I'm not sick," he managed to get out. He inhaled, wet and raspy, sneezed, and started coughing. Fi tilted her head and waited the ten seconds it took for his coughing to quiet.

"Michael," she sighed at last. "You're going to lie there and tell me you feel well right now?"

"Yes," he replied, opening his eyes all the way and focusing on her exasperated face. He set his jaw and began to pull himself out of bed. He made it as far as levering his head a few inches off the pillow before he collapsed. She watched his pitiful efforts without comment, crossing her arms Everything hurt. His head, his trachea, his abdomen, fuck, even the skin between his toes hurt. "I never get sick," he said, his voice coated with both snot and disbelief.

"Here," she held two pills up to his mouth and he dry-swallowed them with no complaint. "Try to go back to sleep," she advised, settling into the armchair she'd drug next to the bed and picking up the thriller she was using to pass the afternoon.

And Michael closed his eyes again and slept through to the next morning, at which point he went to the bathroom, got dressed, sat down at the table and ate four containers of yogurt and two bites of his mother's chicken noodle soup, and declared his sickness "a fluke virus" that had caused everyone to overreact.

"Why was I naked when I woke up?" he asked, shooting a glance at Fi, who shrugged her shoulders and smiled innocently.

"You were delirious in the rages of fever, Michael. Who can say?"

"Right." He paused for a moment, looking up at the ceiling as he struggled to remember something "Were you _singing_ to me?"

She scoffed. "Like I had nothing better to do than sit there and sing all day? Some of us actually work for a living, albeit not with the _CIA_." She shoved away from the table with a clatter of plates. "If you're miraculously better, you could do the dishes for once."

"For once?" he called at her back as she went to the bathroom to change. "I do the dishes all the time!"

She dressed in a fury, thinking back to those hours next to his sickbed, when she had been secure in the knowledge that, for once, she was his whole world. When his face contorted in pain, she would stroke his forehead or rub his back until he relaxed. She put his sheet in the freezer when he got too hot and layered him with blankets when his arms shook so hard with shivers, she thought he'd bruise a rib. She wouldn't leave him long enough to get supplies, calling in Sam and Jesse instead, and then, when they had left and she was alone with him again, she sang to him. Mostly old Irish drinking songs because they were the only ones she knew all the way through, aside from some punk rock that probably would have been the final nail in his coffin. But he seemed to like it regardless; he turned his head in her direction and the nightmares that plagued his sleep didn't come as often. When he would moan, from a bad dream or from the pain, her voice and her presence were all it took to calm him. Sometimes he would wake up a little when she bent to kiss his forehead, measuring the heat on his skin with her lips. "Shh," she said, "shh, it's okay, Michael" over and over, through the day and his dreams, and when he heard it, he would try to smile. Just a little, to reassure her, and she saved them in her soul like poems.

She came out of the bathroom to find him on the phone with Max. She could tell by the expression on his face they were already onto something else. Some other stake-out, some new emergency. She sighed and moved around him, slamming the dishes in the sink as she washed them.

"I have to go meet Max." He shoved his phone in his back pocket.

"Yeah, I figured as much." The water splashed over dirty spoons and plates and she stuck her open palms in the stream, trying to ignore the ache in her chest. _Not from the flu, at least_, she thought. _Unless Michael Westen _is_ a flu._ "Imagine me saying not to overdo it and you not listening."

She felt him hesitate before he turned away. He bent down and kissed her back, in the hollow just under her shoulder blade. Her shirt was low-cut and she could feel his breath there even after he had left, his quiet "Thanks, Fi," echoing in her ears after the thump of the door shutting had faded.


End file.
